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Unity 5.12 Fixes Ubuntu OpenGL Performance Problems

Phoronix: Unity 5.12 Fixes Ubuntu OpenGL Performance Problems

Issued as a stable release update to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS last week was Unity 5.12. Aside from offering some minor usability enhancements and various fixes, Unity 5.12 should fix some of the OpenGL performance problems that many users have experienced -- and multiple Phoronix articles have noted the OpenGL performance slowdown -- so here's some tests seeing how Unity 5.12 now affects the OpenGL gaming performance.

There are still some performance issues with Unity. Compared to a standalone Compiz, Unity has some performance problems with scrolling in applications (e.g. Firefox). Scrolling is faster and "softer" when using Compiz standalone.

Also windowed OpenGL-applications run a bit faster (~5-10%) with Compiz. But that depends heavily on the used hardware.

P.S.:

<self-adulation>

BTW, i was the guy who found the regression. I was so pissed that Unity 5.10 and 5.12 sucked so much on my Latide D830 that a bisected the Bazaar source code and tried to find the regression. And i found it

Michael, you should consider dropping the FPS scale and switch to raw milliseconds, as your results are (very often) misleading.

World of Padman results:
5.10.0: 99.86 FPS
5.12.0: 104.70 FPS

A difference of 4 FPS; quiet nice, isn't it? If the game would have been running at 19 FPS originally then it would put it in the fully playable-and-smooth category, right? Wrong.

99.86 FPS = 10.013 ms per frame
104.70 FPS = 9.551 ms per frame

A difference of only 0.4619 ms. If the game originally ran at 19 FPS then this "speed improvement" would only have given us 0.1653 FPS difference.

Also, if you would have used milliseconds per frame you would have noticed that, a) in the majority of cases it doesn't brake the ~2ms barrier, and b) the speedup of that magnitude is mostly irrelevant when it is the most needed. (At 19 FPS the speedup would be whopping 0.7 FPS, at 10 FPS it would be ~0.2 FPS.)

On future benchmarks, when you have a test running on Ubuntu 12.04, does that mean the out-of-the-box unpatched version, or a fully-updated version?

Same thing applies to Fedora, which tends to issues normal updates that bump the kernel version, etc., and other distros as well.

All depends on the scenario, etc. When looking at the Phoronix Test Suite table it shows you what versions of the key packages are in use, so from there you know if the system is updated or not... but in terms of Ubuntu benchmarking, most of my interest has already turned to 12.10 due to newer kernel and GCC.

Hmm, I'm wondering if this update is somehow why Google Earth now crashes on me. I had no issues with zoom-crashes before last week, and now I get a full-on lock up. Searches suggest a bug in i915 openGL drivers, but like I said, it used to work just fine. I did install an SSD as well, but everything else has been very stable. I wish Google would work on the Linux version of Earth more.